The Girl from Summer Hill, Jude Deveraux, A fun romance.

The Girl from Summer Hill, by Jude Deveraux

I'm a reader who needs to have something lighter, easier to read after reading heavy, important books, like Lilac Girls, in my last review.  Jude Deveraux is on of the writers I can count on to let me imagine different lives and can count on a happy ending. I know that sounds formulaic for romance novels, but that doesn't mean there isn't great character development, full plot arcs and wonderful settings.

 In The Girl from Summer Hill, Deveraux chose to overlay Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice over a completely contemporary setting and characters.  "Lizzie" is played by Casey, an accomplished chef who's come home to her hometown to recover from her last stressful job in DC.  Darcy is played by Tate Landers, an honest to goodness movie star, who owns the estate where Casey comes to rest.  Aside from the sizzle between them, the town is putting on Pride and Prejudice for charity. So the book is structured as a play within a play, within ... well, You'll see.  It's a sweet romance with just enough Hollywood thrown in to make it almost, but not quite, over the top.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review. For more information, contact Random House Publishing. This book will be released on May, 2016.

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelley. Five stars

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

For anyone who loved Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale or Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Lilac Girls is a perfect book. Told from the perspective of three women during WWII with unique and important perspectives, The Lilac Girls will give you an understanding of how life continued in three very different ways.  I thought there had been enough WWII books for a while, but this one was well worth the time and impossible to put down.

Caroline Ferriday is a member of the New York aristocracy working as a volunteer in the French Embassy assembling comfort packages for French orphans when she meets handsome and charming French actor Paul Rodierre.  Though Paul is married, the two fall in love and much of Caroline’s story revolves around finding Paul again after he’s returned to Paris. In the process, she learns of the Rabbits, Polish prisoners at Ravensbrück, Hitler’s only major all female concentration camp upon whom some of the horrible medical experiments were conducted.

One of the Rabbits is Kasia, who was arrested as a young teen for helping her would be boyfriend in the Polish Resistance.  Kasia’s story from before the war through the trials after the war is as mesmerizing as they are awful. 

Perhaps the most original perspective comes from Herta, though. A German patriot, and gifted surgeon, Herta found herself closed out of the male-only community of physicians in Germany.  Even after passing all the tests, she was only able to find part time work as a dermatologist, and thus was unable to support herself or her mother, who depended on her.  When offered the opportunity to serve as a full physician at Ravensbrück, she reluctantly agrees. The progression from compassionate physician to puppet of the Third Reich is heartbreaking, and if it were possible, almost understandable.

This fascinating book is made even more so by the Author’s notes, where we learn not only that these women were real people, (though some conglomeration and literary license added to bring the story together. I won’t spoil the story by adding more facts here, but will just say that the author’s journey alone, finding the facts and putting them together is enthralling.  One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review. For more information, contact Random House Publishing. This book will be released on April 5, 2016.

Another winner by Paula McClain: Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun

By Paula McClain

The beginning of this book, with Beryl Markham taking off for the first transatlantic flight from England to the United States, with her engine failing and her plane hurtling through the air, made me think. Oh. Another tragic book of life lost, of early flight.

I was wrong.  Circling the Sun flies not only on those frightening, early flights but also through the life of this extraordinary woman.  Her story begins in colonial Kenya in 1920, when Africa was untouched and unsullied.  We learn of Beryl as the child left behind, the daughter chosen to stay with her father as he tries his hand at farming and, his specialty, training thoroughbreds. Beryl runs wild in the jungle and learns the ways of the Kip tribe, to hunt, to respect the land, to respect the creatures. 

She grows into a beautiful young woman whose passion for life leads her into the inner circle of Ex-pats living in Africa.  Her love of the continent, the horses, and the people who love it, especially the one who is completely out of her reach, with her mesmerizes the reader into a longing for a simple harshness that only true pioneers can understand.  McClain exceeds her work in The Paris Wife with the telling of this remarkable woman’s triumphs and tragedies.  The first person accounting lets her readers fly with Beryl.  I highly recommend Circling the Sun.  Especially if you want to know how that transatlantic flight comes out.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

It's wedding season, so a romance: Ever After by Jude Deveraux

Ever After by Jude Deveraux The third volume of the Nantucket Bride’s trilogy finds Hallie Hartley, a physical therapist whose stepsister has turned her life into one crisis after another, suddenly the recipient of a lovely home, and a private patient, on beautiful Nantucket Island.  The patient, Jamie Taggert, is a victim of PTSD after serving heroically in the war, but he doesn’t want Hallie, or anyone else, to pity him.  This becomes a challenge for the therapist/masseuse Hallie, whose life calling seems to be taking care of everyone. 

Because it is Nantucket, and because it is the Montgomery and Taggert families, there of course are ghosts.  This time they are matchmakers who serve elaborate tea to Jamie and Hallie, and who interfere in delightful ways.

Deveraux is a master at romance, great characters and fascinating settings and Ever After doesn’t disappoint in any of these.  The characters are well rounded, not perfect but perfectly enchanting. The romances are a bit predictable, but that is partly why we read romance novels and the setting is breathtaking, including beaches, mansions, charming gardens and even a royal wedding.  A great beach/escape read! For Romance readers, 5 stars.

Ever After is available for pre-order now and will be available on June 23, 2015.

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird will enjoy this one: The Truth According to Us, by Annie Barrows

 publication June 9, 2015

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows, co-author of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, takes us to depression era Macedonia, West Virginia, a place between the north and south so much that it changed sides in the civil war 37 times. A town in West Virginia where the major industry, and employer, is not coal, but the American Everlasting Hosiery Company, and southern pride runs deep.

Willa Romeyn, age 12, is a natural born sneak. She lives with her Aunt Jottie, her sister bird and sometimes her charmingly dangerous father, Felix in the house their parents lived in when they founded the American Everlasting Hosiery Company and earned their place in the pages of Macedonia history.  The family has fallen on hard times so that in 1938, they take in a boarder who eventually complicates everything. Willa spends the 500 plus pages of this delightful book figuring out how the family changed and why, and grows up along the way. She figures out who she is and what is important, all the while trying to follow the town values of “Ferocity and Devotion.”

Barrows has a gift with historically based fiction and she’s recreated the slow pace of a southern summer, right down to the hey you porch visits of neighbors on Sunday afternoon.  Willa, a free spirit who idolizes her daddy, for the most part enjoys the freedom of an era gone by, reading books that are too mature for her over and over again, slipping into neighbors houses to visit and explore and becoming a full member of Geraldine’s Army determined to beat the Reds.  Her jealousy is aroused when her beloved father takes up with the boarder, Layla Beck, a Senator’s daughter, who is writing the history of Macedonia as part of the WPA writers project after having been cut off by her rich father for refusing to marry a man of his choosing.

Willa reminds us of young Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Layla is as silly as any Victorian heroine.  Neither of them are reliable narrators though, for that we trust only the indomitable Jottie, whose life has centered around taking care of her family.  Even though technically, the family belongs to her brother. The pace of this small town, with drama and intrigue woven between glasses of iced tea and bootleg whiskey, keeps this book moving.  The loyalty between the family members and friends, with all the quirks of people you know, or wish you did, keeps it from slipping into sentimentality.   It is a place you will miss when you close the cover.

More info about Truth:http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/9072/the-truth-according-to-us-by-annie-barrows/

I received this book from NetGalley for this review.

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda: Complicated, in many ways. 3 stars

Bonita Avenue, by Peter Buwalda, translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder is not an easy book.  None of the three main characters, who narrate the story, are reliable.  Siem Segerius, the math prodigy, near Olympian judoka heads a blended family of passionate, quirky and completely crazy characters.  (Even the “normal” characters are so well drawn that their appearance doesn’t give us much relief from the non-stop descent into the inevitable tragedy.) But Siem’s actions, though not rational, at least make logical sense.  Contrast his telling of the story with poor Aaron, the would be son-in-law, whose extreme jealousy over Joni, Siem’s step daughter push him completely over the edge, despite his eager participation in a scheme that actually pimps Joni out on an internet porn site.  And then there is Joni, who is beautiful, smart and quite likable, but for her extreme exhibitionist needs.

Once you get into the rhythm of the book, it is quite readable, though toward the end I really just wanted to look away.  My biggest problem with it was that the chronology was so “creative” that we actually got the end of the book, the most recent in time, midway through the book from the current stories of both Aaron and Joni. But it is Siems story that fuels the action, and we bounce around with his youthful backstory, to times after his death, to the crisis that ruins them all.

The writing is superb; the characters unforgettable and if you are patient, the complex plot unwinds to an artful and urgent finish.   Bonita Avenue is original, well drawn, but just a bit too much crazy for me, and not something I feel I can recommend to mainstream readers.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.